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2. As alpha is the first, so omega is the last letter of the Greek alphabet. Now the first and last letters of the alphabet may be used to represent in brief the sum and substance of any subject ; just as we call the elements of any study its A B C, so that which is the all-pervading idea, the centre, the substance of any treatise would be its alpha and omega. When Christ declares Himself the Alpha and Omega, He declares Himself the sum and substance of expressed thought. Of whose thought is He the expression ? Of whose language is He the theme ? There can be but one answer. It is God's thought that He expresses, God's language of which He is the utterance. This truth, then, is proclaimed in the text — that Christ is the sum and substance of God's revealed thought.
" In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. . . . All things were made by him ; and without him was not any thing made that was made. In him was life ; and the life was the light of men." What means this lan- guage but that the Son of God, who became flesh in Jesus Christ, is so emphatically the revelation of God's thought that He is called literally the Word of God, and that He has been so from the very beginning of all things ? Christ is God's utterance ; He is all of God's revealed thought; through Him the Father works ; He created the world ; He is the world's spiritual light.
(1) Christ is the sum and substance of the Bible itself, and so the practical truth, the substance of truth to be believed. The book is a mosaic, made by different artists under the unknown direction of a greater than they. It is God's word to man — mani- fold, complex, and prolonged ; and yet when we receive it all, we discover that, of all this mass of revealed thought, Jesus Christ is the Alpha and the Omega, the substance and the sum, the stone out of which each piece of the mosaic is taken, and the figure which all the pieces unite to portray. Looking back to the beginning we can see that though He was but seldom mentioned, He underlay all. In the earliest sacrifices. His sacrifice was implied. The ritual of the Tabernacle and the Temple anticipated His coming. All that God taught men of old time was part and parcel of Christ ; so that, were it lost and He only retained, not one whit of God's thought would perish for mankind.
(2) Christ is the sum and substance of Bible doctrine as well
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as of Bible history. Everything must be viewed in His light. Everything must be explained by its relation to Him. He is the text on which all else is the comment. He is the truth of which all else is the application. He is the centre from which all else radiates, and the foundation on which all else rests.
Tf In a certain canvas belonging to the modern French School, "The Eepose in Egypt," by Oliver Merson, there is a piece of symbolism which fitly concludes the whole matter. Before our eyes stretches the limitless desert pervaded by mysterious half- lights ; above it, the monstrous basaltic Figure that was quarried and sculptured in the depths of antiquity ; then left there in the sand as a monument alike to the plastic powers and superstitions of primitive man. Its stony stare fills the desert with a sense of frustration and ancient death. Yet what is that lying mufiled in a cloak not many yards away from the mammoth feet ? — Joseph the carpenter perchance, who, flying southwards to escape the murderous frenzy of Herod, here rests awhile ! But Mary and the Holy Child — where are they ? Yonder — in the very lap of the Sphinx sleeps the Mother — in her arms the Babe, a radiant spot of light in the deepening dark. Such is the artist's dream, and now what is the interpretation thereof ? Surely this — that in the heart of the great Enigma sleeps its Key ! For, if that amorphous Form with the inscrutable stare be but the emblem of blind yet questioning humanity, propounding riddles while unable itself to solve them, it shelters One who, when grown to man's estate, was to break the silence, appeasing all yearnings, confirming all hesitancies, reshaping all faiths — One who, through paradox and parable, through doctrine, deed, and death, was to inscribe over all altars erected to the Unknown God those words of infinite rest — " Jesus hominum Salvator." ^
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Christ's Eternity.
The text comprises Christ's declaration of Himself ; He asserts His own eternity. He is the beginning of all things and the end of all things — an eternity of the past, an eternity of the future. His power for man resides in these. His two eternities, each of which, His life as Alpha and His life as Omega, has its peculiar benefits for us. Christ says, " I am Eternal." That must mean
^ W. Aylmer-Stark, Mens Jesu Christie 222.
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